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Time and Place: travel, distance and absence
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Four modern poems explore journeys, holidays, a place remembered without love, and a place made painful by someone's absence. These poems are still in copyright, so this lesson describes them in our own words. Use your anthology for the exact words you quote in the exam.
What each poem is about
Postcard from a Travel Snob (Sophie Hannah): a satirical poem in the form of a holiday postcard. The speaker boasts that she has found an unspoilt place far from ordinary tourists, whom she looks down on. The joke is on her: her snobbery makes her ridiculous.
Stewart Island (Fleur Adcock): the speaker remembers time spent on Stewart Island, off the south of New Zealand. When the hotel manager's wife is asked how she can bear to live somewhere so remote, she points to the beauty all around. The speaker's own memories undercut that beauty with uncomfortable details, such as biting sandflies and water too cold to swim in, and a sense of isolation.
Absence (Elizabeth Jennings): the speaker returns to a garden where she used to meet someone who has now gone. Everything, the birds, the fountains and the grass, is just the same, and that makes the absence feel even more violent.
Themes and ideas
Distance and perspective: flying literally shows the world from far away; time and distance change how Adcock sees Stewart Island.
Loss: Jennings shows how a place can hold memories of a person, so an unchanged place becomes painful.
Attitudes to travel: curiosity (Fanthorpe), snobbery (Hannah), honesty about a place (Adcock).
Context: Adcock was born in New Zealand in 1934 and moved to England in 1963. Fanthorpe (1929 to 2009) was an English poet. Hannah, born in Manchester in 1971, is a poet and crime novelist. Jennings (1926 to 2001) was an English poet.
Methods and how to write about them
Hannah: short rhyming stanzas and a chatty postcard voice; satire and irony, because she sneers at tourists while being one; her grand self-description at the end makes her look more foolish.
Adcock: a single block of conversational free verse; irony in the gap between a postcard-pretty image and her real memories.
Jennings: regular stanzas with rhyme, calm on the surface; contrast between the peaceful garden and the speaker's grief; the final image of an earthquake shows the hidden violence of loss.
To write well about satire, explain who is being mocked and how: 'Hannah mocks the speaker, not the tourists, because her boasting reveals her own snobbery.'
Write an analytical paragraph: how does Jennings make the place painful in Absence?
- Point: the place itself has not changed, which makes the person's absence sharper.
- Method: contrast between the gentle garden (birds, fountains, grass) and the speaker's grief.
- Language: the closing image of an earthquake shaking the calm scene when she thinks of the person's name.
- Effect: grief is hidden under a peaceful surface, like a tremor underground.
Answer: Jennings contrasts the unchanged, gentle garden with the speaker's grief: because nothing has moved, the person's absence stands out. The final earthquake image shows that loss shakes her whole world, even though the scene looks calm.
First Flight: wonder versus boredom on a first flight. Postcard from a Travel Snob: satire of a snobbish tourist. Stewart Island: a 'paradise' remembered without love (irony). Absence: an unchanged garden makes loss painful (earthquake image).
The interactive lesson includes the diagrams for this topic.
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